Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday November 22, 2012 @05:11PM
from the our-friends-in-the-middle-east dept.

dsinc writes "Denied the right to travel without consent from their male guardians and banned from driving, women in Saudi Arabia are now monitored by an electronic system that tracks any cross-border movements. Since last week, Saudi women's male guardians began receiving text messages on their phones informing them when women under their custody leave the country, even if they are travelling together. 'The authorities are using technology to monitor women,' said columnist Badriya al-Bishr, who criticised the 'state of slavery under which women are held' in the ultra-conservative kingdom. Women are not allowed to leave the kingdom without permission from their male guardian, who must give his consent by signing what is known as the 'yellow sheet' at the airport or border."

When South Africa did this (to black people, rather than women), under Apartheid, the civilised world rightly condemned it, and imposed trade sanctions.Where are the trade embargoes on Saudi Arabia? They're in contravention of the UN declaration of Human Rights.

Won't happen, and remember this is in accordance with sharia law too. Which is supposed to elevate women above western standards, or so flappy headed groups keep telling us.

Sure, just like Islam is the "religion of peace" even though, of the 120 or so active shooting wars happening today, Muslims are involved in over 100 of them.

At least during the Crusades and the Inquisition, nobody went around talking about how the Catholic Church was the "institution of peace". It's like the farther back in time you go, the more sense the average person had.

I hate to break it to you, but the Christians during the Crusades were the technologically and culturally inferior group. Islamic philosophers were debating Aristotle and inventing things like chemistry, algebra, and hospitals. Christians didn't even know about the Greek philosophers, and when they found out it was because they translated them from Arabic. At which point the religious leaders denounced them and forbid the teaching of them.

The Muslim world obviously went to shit, but don't pretend that the Christian world wasn't composed of mindless fanatics at many points in history. If the Crusades never happened causing the Muslim world to draw in on itself and become paranoid, the Renaissance probably would have occurred in Baghdad.

No it wasn't. If you haven't actually studied Islamic science I recommend you shut up now.

Islamic science and religion were closely related. One of the reasons it was is because unlike Christian science, the natural world wasn't considered some separate entity from God. Muslims felt that studying the natural world was studying God's creation and thus giving them a better understanding of God. There are several hadiths that mention that searching for knowledge was a Muslim duty. Because of this, there was very little censorship of scientific ideas in Medieval Islam even when they contradicted dogma.

The easiest way to describe the difference between Medieval Islam and Medieval Christianity is this: Christians were seeking to increase their faith despite what the natural world told them while Muslims were seeking to understand the natural world in order to better understand God.

Ok, 80-200 years ago:
"of the 120 or so active shooting wars happening today, Chirstian are involved in over 100 of them"
There is nothing unique in Islam or Christianity that makes them war prone, In fact they are not. These are political/land wars. Where religion is used to motivate people.

You direct people away from what you are doing by simply relabeling it. The "institution of peace" instead of "institution of war" (Orwell's example was Ministry of Peace (war), Ministry of Love (torture), Ministry of Plenty (generally supplying barely enough to keep people from starving.)

Sorry but ALL religion is insidious and evil. It is a means of control for the unintelligent and mentally lazy.

With organized religion there is some truth to that.

When an individual is seeking a way to express the more abstract parts of his or her nature, what is called spirituality, and finds that some of the best real teachers had one "persuasion" or another but tend to all say very similar things, as though they all saw the same things and put them in different terms according to different frameworks... there is absolutely nothing wrong with that. Ignoring the progress made by those who came before means you are doomed to constantly reinvent the wheel.

The trick any real individual understands is to not get caught up with any particular language or framework, to instead focus on what truly advanced people have seen or done. It's the difference between looking at the finger that points, versus seeing the heavenly constellation it tries to point out.

Obviously individuals who really grok this tend not to herd together in large congregations with bylaws and conventions and someone to take the meeting minutes. For the most part, that is for the insecure who need to be surrounded by the like-minded to feel validated. Thus anyone who seriously questions or objects is a sort of threat. I for one say fuck that.

Indeed. Make up your own belief system and follow it for as long as convenient. When it no longer fits make up a new one. There's plenty of gods/rituals to choose from so find something that works for you. It's an infinite omniverse out there and it does not fit in the human mind.

Religion should make you grateful for your existence, appreciative of other existences (from the low to the high) and should help you get your way through life. The minute you find yourself telling others how to live or what t

I would more classify it as the central component of religion—into which mythology and theology and laws can be plugged to create a full structured belief system—rather than a 'version' of it. It's the sense that there must be something greater out there, a result of human curiosity and imaginativeness untempered by the agnosticism of science.

(In computing, we call this a security vulnerability.)

That being said, spirituality doesn't make you go out and start wars or subjugate others. That takes someone with ambition. Ideally with a beard, narcissism, and/or early signs of schizophrenia (read: a Messiah complex or pathological liar claiming to have a Messiah complex.) In the absence of such god-kings, religions with destructive practices tend to limit themselves to the occasional virgin sacrifice. No one had to invent a religious motive to attack Carthage.

Sorry but ALL religion is insidious and evil. It is a means of control for the unintelligent and mentally lazy.

That's why the bible says "Now the Bereans were of more noble character than the Thessalonians, for they received the message with great eagerness and examined the Scriptures every day to see if what Paul said was true." (Acts 17:11). It is noble *NOT* to be unintelligent, and mentally lazy. It is noble *to validate* what you are being taught. It is not RELIGION that is the problem. It is that people lack diligence and let themselves be controlled.

Religion is what allows civilization to not just progress through a social evolution, but to survive. Humanity needs religion as a whole, because our brains are wired that way.

Meanwhile, back in reality, people are rightfully starting to worry about the combination of Atomic Age weaponry that modern science has given us and the and Bronze Age morality that the world's mainstream religions have saddled us with.

Ever read the Bible? How about the Koran? Ever imagine going back in time and giving those guys nukes? How does your "civilization" look in that scenario?

What is your point? We are the ones who made nukes and they have been used twice already. I'm not so sure we should be throwing rocks at the ancients on this one. They weren't idiots any more than anyone else is. You demonstrate what such a weapon can do, and they wouldn't have used it either. I suppose it is great and all that we have been able to hold off on using them, but don't take our weapons of mass destruction and assume they'd do something we wouldn't with them.

They weren't idiots any more than anyone else is. You demonstrate what such a weapon can do, and they wouldn't have used it either.

They would've used them all the time. Just giving them the weapons, and showing them the immediate results, is not enough to deter future use.

In order to stop they would need a complete understanding of the environmental impacts, advanced medicine, genetics, complex systems, etc.

Even right now you have morons who can't figure out, or believe, how small the world actually is and how a single nuclear event can have widespread, long lasting consequences. Same people who believe the world is too large, complex,

More accurately, during WWII, Germany and Japan also had nuclear programs. The U.S. just managed to get there first. After the war, Russia go into the game, quickly followed by France and Britain.

And the two nukes dropped on Japan were not dropped in a vacuum. After a grueling war in the Pacific, Japan was fully prepared for an invasion. Given the way Japanese soldiers fought to the death in Saipan, Guam, etc., the U.S. faced the prospect of creating another million deaths on the home islands as well as losing another 300,000-500,000 G.I.s invading Japan. And leaving an unbowed Japan after what they did in China and SE Asia and given their then culture, it would have guaranteed a new war when they re-armed. Presented with that, Truman decided to use the nukes in the hopes of getting a quick end. And it almost didn't happen. There was a palace coup that nearly succeeded, it seemed some in the Japanese military thought the Emperor would capitulate rather than continue to fight on.

... Bronze Age morality that the world's mainstream religions have saddled us with

Stop slandering the Bronze Age - ancient Greece, where democracy was invented, was a Bronze Age society. Oppressing and enslaving people for "moral" reasons is an invention of a more advanced civilisation; the Greeks had slaves, but their slaves could win their freedom, unlike in the modern versions.

It is worth remembering also, that religion is constructed by people, and religious people wrote the stories in the holy books. It is wrong to say that religion makes people do things, whether they are good or bad. Good people do good things and bad people do bad things; and if they happen to be religious, then they will blame both on their religion, but it doesn't mean that it is true.

There was a time when the Muslim civilisation was the greatest on the planet, a beacon of knowledge and tolerance, while the Christian world was in the deepest darkness; now it is the other way round. This is not because of religion, race or any of the other stupid non-explanations - it is simply because of wealth and power. Freedom, democracy, tolerance and so on tend to seem like luxury items when you can barely find enough food or water each day. Perhaps it would be helpful if we stopped going on about what people in developing ought to do in terms of freedom, and instead concentrated on making it possible, by fighting poverty and corruption.

Quite possibly true in the distant path. But demonstrably untrue since the Age of the Enlightenment (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment) and the improvement in mankind's general condition from the accompanying industrial revolution.

Religion is what allows civilization to not just progress through a social evolution, but to survive. Humanity needs religion as a whole, because our brains are wired that way.

My brain isn't wired that way. I find religions offensive to the human spirit, and think they are what is holding society back.

Religions are the excuse humans use for the unexplained because they are either too scared or too lazy to find the truth. It's easier to pretend that "magical" things are going to happen after you die, since they do NOT happen while you are alive.

>> back then the average life expectancy was about 35. So if you didn't have kids young, you wouldn't be around to raise them for long.

Slight side note there. The average life expectancy may have been 35, but remove all the infant deaths (those dying aged 0-2 years old) and the average bounces way up into the mid-60's, not so massively different to today's.

I strongly doubt it was ever considered 'normal'. The autonomic empathic response is the natural normal state of human social interaction. An adult raping a child is not 'normal' it is insane, it was always insane, it is crazy to claim an insane act as normal.

I'll fix it for you, "You could get away with raping child, animals, slaves and, serfs", you could beat slaves and serfs to death for amusement if you were the psychopathic lord of the region. Just because you could get away with this does not make

The problem isn't that morality back in the day was different (i.e. more primitive). The problem is that, faithheads think that what's written in the book is absolute. So the example of Mohammed sleeping with a 9 year old, or the bible advocating slavery, genocide etc. are examples to prove that modern morality is far better than the obviously flawed "absolute" morality advocated in those books.

10 years old is the lower bound of the beginning of puberty in girls, in other words, definitely not ready for sex/reproduction. But it seems Aisha was somehow praised for being a true virgin, that is, when Muhammad first raped her she didn't have had her first period yet.

The upper bound of the end of puberty in girls is 17 and, as Chef from South Park correctly said, that is the right time for sex (laws and social conventions aside).

this is in accordance with sharia law too. Which is supposed to elevate women above western standards, or so flappy headed groups keep telling us.

It is suppossed to. The problem is that men are in charge of the implementation and that's a common problem across the entire world. Regardless of the laws on the books, if the people interpreting them are not representative of the people they are applied to, the end result is going to be biased like health insurance paying for viagra but not birth control pills.

It is suppossed to. The problem is that men are in charge of the implementation and that's a common problem across the entire world. Regardless of the laws on the books, if the people interpreting them are not representative of the people they are applied to, the end result is going to be biased like health insurance paying for viagra but not birth control pills.

Really? So I now have two people within a mere 40mins of each other, one saying it does. Another saying it doesn't. Odd. Oh, as for your idea that it does? I take it that you've read that good book, and the various legal documents surrounding sharia. Especially the parts where a women's testimony is worth less than a man's, where rape is the women's fault and so on.

Don't be naive. It has nothing to do with "men who institute it." The entire system of sharia, is built around oppression, for the sake of oppression.

The quran does not put the blame on the woman. The remedy is marriage, which is barbaric by modern standards and sure as hell seems like blaming the victim, but it is hardly unique to islam

Not being unique to Islam doesn't make it not blaming the victim, which is what it is.

As for sharia elevating women aboive western standards, it is empirically true because the west doesn't make an effort to codify that at all

Uh no. That is so ass-backwards it would be funny if it weren't pathetic. The west has succeeded in fact in codifying equality for women in numerous cases. Not religious ones, though... secular. That is, law. And some law is slanted in favor of women today, e.g. sexual harassment law. Of course, that's only an attempt to counter pervasive oppression of women, but it's still the case.

If I had to guess, I'd say everything you know comes from people with an agenda to denigate islam rather than from the people for whom it is no big deal.

no, the problem is that saudis have oil,. if they didnt, MOST places around the world would not give a fuck about them, and as such they would disappear into the ages. But until their oil runs out, or we get off oil, we are stuck dealing with savages

Muslim countries didn't sign UN declaration of Human Rights because they perceived it as not compatible with Islam. Although these countries got own version of Human Rights declaration:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Declaration_on_Human_Rights_in_Islam

So there's this ugly realization that if you embrace the concept that all cultures are equal you must stand by and helplessly watch as little girls have their clitoris mutilated and homosexuals hung. It's like giving people democracy only to find out they want to elect people from the seventh century. Crap. Now what?

That's retarded.You don't "give" people democracy.They have to take it for themselves.You can nudge, encourage, provide education, but ultimately "democracy from above" will never work, because it's a matter of culture and you can't have democracy if first you don't change the culture.

To leave China, you need an exit visa. This is also in contravention of UN declaration of human rights. Would you expect a trade embargo against the Chinese too?

Its even worse in Saudi Arabia.. according to the great and powerful wikepedia Exit Visas [wikipedia.org] are required by foreign workers in Saudi Arabia and Qatar

.. Hence at the end of a foreign worker's employment period, the worker must secure clearance from his/her employer stating that the worker has satisfactorily fulfilled the terms of his/her employment contract or that the worker's services are no longer needed..

Really, do muslim men have such small dicks & huge, over-inflated egos, that they cannot keep their wimen in check with flowers, chocolate & pretty lies? *duck*

Seriously, this is an entire country supporting gender-terrorism (there, I said it first!), but that's ok, because they have a 'state religion' to hide behind & rationalise an oppressive law??? Isn't it high time you yanks stopped chasing the oil/money & started disbanding all state religious leadership

Are you seriously blaming the lack of an international response to this situation on political correctness? I just want to be certain because you would win my "Who said the stupidest fucking thing I've heard all year contest" without an even remotely close competitor.

NOBODY fucks with Saudi Arabia because of oil. Period. Political correctness doesn't even enter the picture. If they so much as fart in public, the price of oil doubles. Seriously, pull your head out of your ass and wake the fuck up.

You make it too complicated. The international boycotts against South Africa were justified because they were effective. An embargo against Saudi Arabia would be ineffective, even if it were possible.

In short, South Africa was a small country that could be pushed around; Saudi Arabia makes too much oil for that to be possible. Any such demonstrations would be pointless and would cause more harm than the original insult.

Try boycotts of the Saudi Arabia. Besides oil, their biggest export and tourism attraction is the religion. Prevent 2 billion muslims from doing their sacred hadj in the name of women's rights, see a world war 3 unfold.

I think it's fair to say that this specific situation has bugger all to to with "political correctness" in the sense you mean it.
It's about oil, "stability in the middle east" (ie oil), an "ally to the west" (ie oil).

It is not "political correctness". It is diplomacy in the worst sense of the word. The sense that allows countries to "smooth over" inconvenient realities and buddy up to the extent that dependency increases to the point becomes practically impossible to say "no". The "bleeding hearts" didn't get us here, the cold pragmatists did.

Political expediency is the problem not political correctness. The solution? Frankly I don't see an easy one.

"Political Correctness" - top oxymoron of the 21st century! How did those two words even get into the same phrase/sentence orignally?

It was originally introduced as a joke phrase, as a way of ridiculing those who preached and practised it. So it was deliberately ridiculous, as you observe. However, when those who preach and practise it heard the phrase, being so disconnected from reality they failed to recognise it as a joke at their expense and, thinking the phrase was rather good, began to use it themselves. Then eventually they did realise it was a joke against them and they now avoid it.

We need to get our fracking industry going full bore, convert all semi's to use it, and get to where we import 0% oil from anywhere. Let China and Russia keep the straights of Hormuz clear. Let the Saudies fall back into the decrepit 3rd world pit it deserves to be.

We need to get our fracking industry going full bore, convert all semi's to use it, and get to where we import 0% oil from anywhere. Let China and Russia keep the straights of Hormuz clear. Let the Saudies fall back into the decrepit 3rd world pit it deserves to be.

No... We need to get our bio-diesel industry going full bore, convert all vehicles to use it, and get to where we import 0% oil from anywhere. Fracking is simply the equivalent to swirling the straw around the bottom of the cup, trying to suck up the last dribbles of milkshake. If you have to frack, the well is dry.

We KNOW wind, solar, wave & geothermal work. We know a number of alternate bio-fuels work. We know natural gas works. We know hydrogen & electrical power sources work, the ultimate power source notwithstanding. We know nuclear fission reactors work, are relatively safe (I don't want to argue the point) & produce far less pollution & environmental damage per Gigawatt than fossil fuels. We know that nuclear fusion works, we just haven't invested seriously enough into it to make it practical, which we could have done 20-25 years ago. We know a number of other fuel sources & methods that could work, if adapted to varying degrees.

However, we also know that oil works far, far more easily & cheaply than any of those right now & into the foreseeable future & is far more profitable, both in a monetary and geo-political sense. Not to mention the very deep pockets half the world's politicians & corporate heads have that touches on the oil industry in one way or another. It would perhaps be easier to get rid of electricity & copper wire as the main delivery method that powers all our devices, than oil as a primary fuel source right now. And that's saying something...

The "service" has been in operation since 2010 and it applies to all "dependents" which includes children, contracted laborers, etc. See: http://riyadhbureau.com/blog/2012/11/saudi-women-tracking. As offensive as the Saudi gov't policies are, getting half the story isn't going to help matters.

I'm no feminist, but this is unjust and stupid
It's also hilarious how the USA are all over supposed human rights in Russia and Belarus where people live with dignity, and overlook insane places like the Saudi Arabia is.

It may surprise people but.... Saudi has ALWAYS had this system of tracking women.

As a child, when I left the country to visit my grandparents, accompanied by my mother, we had to be legally escorted to the airport and signed out by my dad, on re-entry we were re-checked into my dad's care.We were westerners living under the same rules as the locals. This was as far back as early 80s... the system has been in play forever. This is merely a modernisation of the system. I'm not saying I agree with the practice but, this is hardly headline news as its simply an upgrade to rules and methods for applying those rules that have been in play for a long long time.

Why is it only now, when computers get involved that people are having issues with the basic concept? It was widely unknown it appears when the system was paperbased.

On the other hand, as far as I can tell, never in non-Muslim cultures have women been forced to cover themselves from head to toe, with only their eyes visible. Or not allowed to leave the house without a male custodian. That's a unique curiosity only found in portions of the Muslim world.

ALL dependants are covered: women, Children (both boys and girls) *and* all workers whose work visa you have given.

If they are on your ID card (women and children don't get separate ID cards) or their Passport (as their "kafeel" caretaker, or visa giver, as it were), you need the Saudi man's permission to leave, and they will now be informed of it.

I think this system was made for the "worker" part of the category in mind; they want to know where their slaves^H^H^H^H^H^H are going, and if they are escaping. Poor labourers are practically indentured slaves, kept in live via the sword of heavy debt; I have know people try to escape by leaving everything behind with just the clothes on their backs. This is to prevent that.

Unfortunately things such as this reflect the will of much of the population there...

I doubt that. Out of the entire population, only 20% are Saudi citizens (the rest are migrant workers with no say in anything). Out of that 20%, less than half are women. So this means, that this new system is being supported by less than 10% of the population.

In fact the saudi arabian government has expiremented with loosening the laws on women but have been met with death threats and back lash from the population from trying such things.

Death threats? Obama gets death threats and back lash from the far-right every day. That doesn't mean he lets them set the agenda.

Face it. Saudi Arabia is a highly hierarchical structure. The minority in power do not want to let go any of its power. T

Firstly, genetics isn't the only form of hereditary. Cultural values are transmitted from parents to children - including attitudes to women. Secondly, the GP was talking about Muslims, which is a religious group, not a racial group.

This is the best of all of those solutions. Think about it.. it doesn't take any resources at all to implement, and in a generation or so Saudi Arabia will have totally cured itself of all those pesky upstart women!

Well played, but I'd like to point out that my family does not own a car - we go around mostly by bike or walking (I commute to work by bicycle every workday, even in winter). For the rare occasions that we need to go further than 20 Km, we use public transport. So, while we do use hydrocarbons indirectly (various polymers and other chemicals), we're trying to minimize it by not having a car and recycling plastics.

The fact of the matter is that Gaza, Judea, and Samaria have high rates of population GROWTH, as do Israeli Arabs, which by itself puts paid to the ridiculous claim that Israel is engaged in ethnic cleansing. The fact that Israel admits over 100,000 Palestinians from Gaza, Judea, and Samaria for medical care (provided at no charge if the PA does not pay for it) every year is also inconsistent with the claim of ethnic cleansing. Jordan has killed far more Palestinians that Israel ever has.

They're just one step from taking them to the vet and "chipping" them.

I suspect they may already have gotten to that.

I've often wondered, after all the US' TLAs have done (South & Central America (United Fruit/Chiquita Banana), Cuba (Bay of Pigs), S. E. Asia (VietNam), The Cold War,...), why hasn't sufficient provocation been found yet for the US military to roll over Saudi Arabia? Grenada and Panama ranked, so why not SA? They couldn't hope to stop the US. You'd think it would be a drop dead simple (practically bloodless coup even) solution to "The Troubles" in the M

Because the Saudi regime hasn't given the US any cause to invade -- it already sells oil cheaply. Remember that the only oil-producing countries the US is unfriendly with are ones that hint that they won't follow every whim of US foreign policy (like Venezuela supplying oil to Cuba).

No, read it again. It indicates about 200 thousand PEOPLE are sexually assaulted each year.

About 100% of assaulters are men.

Factually false.

If we want to combat sexist prejudiced stereotype bullshit in society, we need combat all of it. And that includes the sexist notion that any man is "lucky" to have sex. The sexist notion that men cannot or do not refuse consent to sex. The sexist notion that men are not raped, and fucked-up definitions of "rape" which categorically deny the possibility of a man being raped (except by another man).

Lets look at a very recent survey [cdc.gov] done by the United States Center For Disease Control. It defines "Rape" as attempted or competed forcible penetration of the victim as well as drug/alcohol facilitated completed penetration of the victim. It reports lifetime "rape" rates at about 18.3% of all women and about 1.4% of all men. However this report has a brand new section, a category that has been implicitly excluded for pretty much all previous rape research. It's a category called "made to penetrate". I will remind you that "made to penetrate" does is EXCLUDED from the definition of "rape". The report gives a lifetime rate of 4.8% of all men "made to penetrate".

And lets be clear on what "made to penetrate" means. I was recently reading a message board which had nothing to do with sexuality where, out of the blue, someone commented on the stereotype that men cannot be rape victims, and posted a request for men to share their stories if they had ever been raped. A completely generic non-sex-related community with a fairly random sampling of male readers. Unsurprisingly most of the replies were anonymous. They included reports including a man raped at gunpoint, a man walking on campus in the dark being tasered by an unknown woman then handcuffed to a tree raped and tasered again to the rapist could remove the handcuffs and run off, multiple reports of men discovering their drink had been drugged and being unable to fight off their attacker, multiple reports of men being threatened with being accused of rape themselves if they did not submit - including a case where a man walked into his bedroom to find a naked woman demanding sex and when he resisted she deliberately scratched his neck and hands and threatening to claim he tried to rape her. The reports just went on and on. Those are just what I recall offhand.

Not a single one of those incidents qualifies as "rape" in the CDC survey, not a single one of them constitutes "rape" under virtually any rape survey ever done. They fall under the brand new category "made to penetrate"..... because somehow forcible penis-in-vagina sex is not rape when a woman does it. All men are sex-obsessed animals without the ability or right to decline sex. Because any man who gets raped is "lucky" he got to have sex.

And one notable fact is that not a single one of them reported their rape to the police. The rate of women reporting rape is abysmally low, but it doesn't remotely compare to the effectively ZERO rate of men reporting rape. The social stigma, victim blaming, shaming, and rape-denialism against women is an abomination, but it is as bad or worse for any man attempting to report being raped. Not a single one of the male rape victims reported it to the police.... but there was one case of a male rape victim who tried calling a rape-support hotline. And you know what happened? The person who answered the phone (presumably female) CALLED HIM A LIAR and told him to stop making prank calls. Seriously, how fucked up is that? A fucking RAPE SUPPORT LINE calling a rape victim a liar, saying no you weren't raped and stop fucking calling. Solely because the victim was male. Pure unadulterated sexist ideology and prejudi